why do i find myself less involved in EA?

epistemic status: i timeboxed the below to 30 minutes. it's been bubbling for a while, but i haven't spent that much time explicitly thinking about this. i figured it'd be a lot better to share half-baked thoughts than to keep it all in my head — but accordingly, i don't expect to reflectively endorse all of these points later down the line. i think it's probably most useful & accurate to view the below as a slice of my emotions, rather than a developed point of view. i'm not very keen on arguing about any of the points below, but if you think you could be useful toward my reflecting processes (or if you think i could be useful toward yours!), i'd prefer that you book a call to chat more over replying in the comments. i do not give you consent to quote my writing in this short-form without also including the entirety of this epistemic status.

• 1-3 years ago, i was a decently involved with EA (helping organize my university EA program, attending EA events, contracting with EA orgs, reading EA content, thinking through EA frames, etc).
• i am now a lot less involved in EA.
  • e.g. i currently attend uc berkeley, and am ~uninvolved in uc berkeley EA
  • e.g. i haven't attended a casual EA social in a long time, and i notice myself ughing in response to invites to explicitly-EA socials
  • e.g. i think through impact-maximization frames with a lot more care & wariness, and have plenty of other frames in my toolbox that i use to a greater relative degree than the EA ones
  • e.g. the orgs i find myself interested in working for seem to do effectively altruistic things by my lights, but seem (at closest) to be EA-community-adjacent and (at furthest) actively antagonistic to the EA community
• (to be clear, i still find myself wanting to be altruistic, and wanting to be effective in that process. but i think describing my shift as merely moving a bit away from the community would be underselling the extent to which i've also moved a bit away from EA's frames of thinking.)
• why?
  • a lot of EA seems fake
    • the stuff — the orientations — the orgs — i'm finding it hard to straightforwardly point at, but it feels kinda easy for me to notice ex-post
  • there's been an odd mix of orientations toward [ aiming at a character of transparent/open/clear/etc ] alongside [ taking actions that are strategic/instrumentally useful/best at accomplishing narrow goals... that also happen to be mildly deceptive, or lying by omission, or otherwise somewhat slimy/untrustworthy/etc ]
    • the thing that really gets me is the combination of an implicit (and sometimes explicit!) request for deep trust alongside a level of trust that doesn't live up to that expectation.
      • it's fine to be in a low-trust environment, and also fine to be in a high-trust environment; it's not fine to signal one and be the other. my experience of EA has been that people have generally behaved extremely well/with high integrity and with high trust... but not quite as well & as high as what was written on the tin.
    • for a concrete ex (& note that i totally might be screwing up some of the details here, please don't index too hard on the specific people/orgs involved): when i was participating in — and then organizing for — brandeis EA, it seemed like our goal was (very roughly speaking) to increase awareness of EA ideas/principles, both via increasing depth & quantity of conversation and via increasing membership. i noticed a lack of action/doing-things-in-the-world, which felt kinda annoying to me... until i became aware that the action was "organizing the group," and that some of the organizers (and higher up the chain, people at CEA/on the Groups team/at UGAP/etc) believed that most of the impact of university groups comes from recruiting/training organizers — that the "action" i felt was missing wasn't missing at all, it was just happening to me, not from me. i doubt there was some point where anyone said "oh, and make sure not to tell the people in the club that their value is to be a training ground for the organizers!" — but that's sorta how it felt, both on the object-level and on the deception-level.
    • this sort of orientation feels decently reprensentative of the 25th percentile end of what i'm talking about.
  • also some confusion around ethics/how i should behave given my confusion/etc
    • importantly, some confusions around how i value things. it feels like looking at the world through an EA frame blinds myself to things that i actually do care about, and blinds myself to the fact that i'm blinding myself. i think it's taken me awhile to know what that feels like, and i've grown to find that blinding & meta-blinding extremely distasteful, and a signal that something's wrong.
      • some of this might merely be confusion about orientation, and not ethics — e.g. it might be that in some sense the right doxastic attitude is "EA," but that the right conative attitude is somewhere closer to (e.g.) "embody your character — be kind, warm, clear-thinking, goofy, loving, wise, [insert more virtues i want to be here]. oh and do some EA on the side, timeboxed & contained, like when you're donating your yearly pledge money."
• where now?
  • i'm not sure! i could imagine the pendulum swinging more in either direction, and want to avoid doing any further prediction about where it will swing for fear of that prediction interacting harmfully with a sincere process of reflection.
  • i did find writing this out useful, though!

I feel like EAs might be sleeping a bit on digital meetups/conferences.

My impression is that many people prefer in-person events to online ones. But at the same time, a lot of people hate needing to be in the Bay Area / London or having to travel to events.

There was one EAG online during the pandemic (I believe the others were EAGxs), and I had a pretty good experience there. Some downsides, but some strong upsides. It seemed very promising to me.

I'm particularly excited about VR. I have a Quest3, and have been impressed by the experience of chatting to people in VRChat. The main downside is that there aren't any professional events in VR that would interest me. Quest 3s are expensive ($500), but far cheaper than housing and office space in Berkeley or London. 

I'd also flag:
1. I think that video calls can be dramatically improved with better microphone and camera setups. These can cost $200 to $2k or so, but make a major difference.
2. I've been doing some digging into platforms similar to GatherTown. I found GatherTown fairly ugly, off-putting, and limited. SpatialChat seems promising, though it's more expensive. Zoom seems to be experimenting in the space with products like Zoom Huddles (for coworking in small groups), but these are new. 
3. I like Focusmate, but think we could have better spaces for EAs/community members.
4. I think that people above the age of 25 or so find VR weird for what I'd describe as mostly status quo bias. Younger people seem to be far more willing and excited to hangout in VR. 
5. I obviously think this is a larger business question. It seems like there was a wave of enthusiasm for remote work at COVID, and this has mostly dried up. However, there are still a ton of remote workers. My guess is that businesses are making a major mistake by not investing enough in better remote software and setups. 
6. Organizing community is hard, even if its online. I'd like to see more attempts to pay people to organize online coworking spaces and meetups more. 
7. I think that online events/conferences have become associated with the most junior talent. This seems like a pity to me.
8. I expect that different online events should come with different communities and different restrictions. A lot of existing online events/conferences are open to everyone, but then this means that they will be optimized for the most junior people. I think that we want a mix here. 
9. Personally, I abhor the idea that I need to couple the place where I physically live with the friends and colleagues I have. I'd very much prefer optimizing for these two separately.
10. I think our community would generally be better off if remote work were easier to do. I'd expect this would help on multiple fronts - better talent, happier talent, lower expenses, more resilience from national politics, etc. This is extra relevant giving the current US political climate - this makes it tougher to recommend that others immigrate to the US or even visit (and the situation might get worse). 
11. I'd definitely admit that remote work has a lot of downsides right now, especially with the current tech. So I'm not recommending that all orgs go remote. Just that we work on improving our remote/online infrastructure.